Posted by Hugh on November 29, 2014, at 11:44:02
Ive always been struck by the fact that the treatment options did not seem to have dramatically improved over the course of decades, Dr. Canli told Op-Talk. I always had a feeling that somehow we seem to be missing the actual treatment of the disease.
He was intrigued by research showing a connection between depression and inflammation in the body, and he started to think about the known causes of inflammation among them pathogens like bacteria, viruses and parasites.
...
He believes researchers should compare tissue samples from depressed patients with those from non-depressed people, looking for evidence both of known pathogens and of new ones.
If successful, such a search could bring about big changes in depression treatment. Imagine if we had identified one or multiple pathogens that all are associated with major depression, Dr. Canli said. That could mean that at some point in the future a patient would present himself or herself at the doctors office and the first thing they would do is run a workup on the blood or stool sample to identify exactly which particular pathogens might be present, and then develop a very targeted treatment program to address exactly those.
One day, he suggests in his paper, research into infection and depression could even lead to a vaccine.
I think if we are open to new ideas and research approaches we should have a good chance of developing much better treatments for depression, he told Op-Talk. Im less hopeful that staying with the status quo is necessarily the way to go. Understanding how depression really works, for him, is key: I think we should try to really be innovative about discovering mechanisms. Once we can get at the mechanisms, I feel much more hopeful.
The complete article is here:
http://op-talk.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/what-if-were-wrong-about-depression
Dr. Canli's paper is here:
poster:Hugh
thread:1073833
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20141120/msgs/1073833.html